I am in Berlin for the Wikipedia Academy, a very cool hybrid free
culture community plus refereed academic conference organized, in
part, by Wikimedia Deutschland. On Friday, I was very excited to
have been invited to give the conference's opening keynote based
on my own hybrid take on learning from failures in peer production and
incorporating a bunch of my own research. Today, I was on a panel
at the conference about free culture and sharing practices. I'll post
talks materials and videos when the conference puts them online.

I will be in Berlin for the next week or so before I head to directly
to Washington, DC for Wikimania between the 11th and 15th. I'll be
giving three talks there:

Yesterday, we convened a virtual meeting of the Global Iron Blogger
Council (i.e., an email thread) and we all agreed a new on iron
blogger rule that might sweeten the deal for jet-setting
prospective Iron Bloggers: any paid-up member of any Iron Blogger club
can attend meet-ups in any other Iron Blogger cities if they happen to
be in town for one. Because We Are One.

If you want to join us in Boston, we have some room through
attrition. Rust bloggers, perhaps? If you'd like to join, you should
contact me.

And if you'd like to set up your own in a different city, the code is
in git. One warning, however. As those of us that have set it up
have figured out, the documentation for the software to run Iron
Blogger is between poor and non-existent. If you do want to set up
your own instance, please get in touch. I'm happy to give you some
pointers that you'll probably need but, more importantly, I'd like to
work with the next brave soul to put together documentation of the
setup process along the way.

I am in Berlin for the Wikipedia Academy, a very cool hybrid free
culture community plus refereed academic conference organized, in
part, by Wikimedia Deutschland. On Friday, I was very excited to
have been invited to give the conference's opening keynote based
on my own hybrid take on learning from failures in peer production and
incorporating a bunch of my own research. Today, I was on a panel
at the conference about free culture and sharing practices. I'll post
talks materials and videos when the conference puts them online.

I will be in Berlin for the next week or so before I head to directly
to Washington, DC for Wikimania between the 11th and 15th. I'll be
giving three talks there:

Network effects -- the concept that a good or service
increases in value as more people use it -- are not a new problem for
free software. Software developers target Microsoft Windows because
that is where the large majority of users are. Users with no love for
Microsoft and who are otherwise sympathetic to free software use
Windows because programs they need will only run there.

Folks worried about Facebook are afraid for similar reasons. Sure, you
can close down your Facebook account and move to Diaspora. But who
will you talk to there? You can already hear people complaining about
Facebook the same way they've been complaining about Windows or Office
for years. People feel that their hands are tied and that their
software, and their social network, will be determined by what everybody is
doing.

I'm worried about Facebook. But I'm not too intimidated by Facebook's
network effects for two reasons.

First, using Facebook doesn't preclude using anything else.

Twitter has enormous overlapping functionality with Facebook.
Sure, people use the systems very differently. But they both ask you to
create lists of friends and followers and are designed around sending
and receiving short status
messages. Millions of people do both and both systems are
thriving. For the millions of people who use both Facebook and
Twitter, the two services have had to negotiate their marginal utility
in a world they share with the other one. People decide that Twitter
is for certain types of short messages and Facebook is for others. But
these arrangements shift over time.

And the relationships between services aren't always peaceful coexistence.
Remember Friendster? Remember Orkut? Remember Tribe? Remember
MySpace? MySpace, and all the others, are great examples of how
social networks die. They very slowly fade away. MySpace
users signed up for Facebook accounts and used both. They almost never just
switched. Over time, as one platform became more
attractive than the other, for many complicated reasons, attention and
activity shifted. People logged in on MySpace less and Facebook more
and, eventually, realized they were effectively no longer MySpace
users. Anyone that has been on the Internet long enough to watch a few
of these shifts from one platform to another knows that they're not
abrupt -- even if they can be set in motion by a particular event or
action. Users of social networking sites simply don't have to choose
in the way that a person choosing to boot Windows and
GNU/Linux does.

I'm sure the vast majority of people with Diaspora accounts use
Facebook actively. This is not a problem for Diaspora. It is
how Diaspora -- or whatever else eventually achieves what many of us
hoped Diaspora would -- could win.

Second, Facebook is for the ephemeral.

Facebook is primarily used for information that was produced very
recently. This week if not today. If not this hour.
Facebook has an enormous amount of data that users have fed it that
may be hard to get out and move somewhere else. But most people don't
care very much about having any regular access to the large majority
of this information. What people care deeply about
is having access to the data that they and their friends created today. And
that data can just as easily be created somewhere else tomorrow. Or,
with the right tools, created just as easily in both places.

Compare this to something like Windows where moving away would require
learning, converting, and perhaps even writing, new software. Perhaps even in
new programming languages that most developers don't know yet. Compared to
Windows, a migration away from Facebook will be easy.

Facebook's photo galleries are an example of an important place where this
holds less well. Social network information -- i.e., the list of who is friends
with who -- is another example of something that is persistently
valuable. That said, people really enjoy the act of finding and
friending. Indeed, this process was
part of the initial draw of Facebook and other social networks.

None of this means that Facebook is over. It doesn't even mean that its
ascendancy will be slowed. What it does mean is that Facebook is vulnerable
to the next thing more than many technology firms that have benefited
from network effects in the past. If users are given compelling reasons to
switch to something else, they can with less trouble and they will.

That compelling reason might be a new
social network with better features or an awesome distributed architecture that
allows freedom for users and the ability of those users to
benefit from new and fantastic things that Facebook's overseers would never let them have and without the things Facebook's users suffer through today. Or it
might be a sexier proprietary box to store users' private information.
It doesn't mean that I'm not worried about Facebook. I remain
deeply worried. It's just not very hard for me to imagine the end.

When I set an alarm, my clock, now running on the computer in my
pocket, is smart enough to tell me how much time will pass until
the alarm is scheduled to sound. This has eliminated the old problem
of sleeping past meetings before being surprised by an alarm precisely
half a day after I had originally planned to wake.

The price has been having to know exactly how little I will sleep: a
usually depressing fact that had previously been obscured by my
difficulty doing time arithmetic in my most somnolent moments.

As the free software and free culture movements have sat quietly by,
DRM is now well on its way to becoming the norm in the electronic book
publishing industry.

The free culture movement has failed to communicate the reality of
DRM and, as a result, millions of people are buying books that they
won't be able to read when they switch to a different model of ebook
reader in the future. They are buying books that will become
inaccessible when the DRM system that supports them is shut down -- as
we've already seen with music from companies including Wal*Mart,
Yahoo, and Microsoft. They are buying books that require that
readers use proprietary tools that lock them out from doing basic
things that have always been the right of a book owner.

Some anti-DRM advocates are, indirectly, part of this problem as they
buy these books and turn to shadymethods of stripping the
DRM. Buying DRMed books is voting with your wallet for a system that
criminalizes those that insist on living in freedom and will screw us
all in the long run when DRM is the only choice we are offered and
removing the DRM is difficult, unsafe, and illegal.

Buying non-DRMed e-books is a more freedom-friendly alternative for
those that, like me, are excited about not lugging kilograms of paper
around our cities and the world. We can do this at "non-mainstream"
publishers like Smashwords who explicitly reject DRM. Of course,
the big ebook sellers like Amazon, and Barnes and Nobel, and Google
all offer non-DRMed books. But none of the major ebook retailers
explicitly reveal the DRM status of locked down books before
purchase.

It's hard to support non-DRM alternatives when we can't recognize
them. It's hard to tell people to not buy DRM ebooks if we can't even
tell them apart. Getting this message through to book buyers -- and
perhaps even to ebook retailers -- seems like a critical first step.